


Something Echoed

by TheWillowBends



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22338616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWillowBends/pseuds/TheWillowBends
Summary: This isn’t your world.  This world is a stranger.
Relationships: Link & Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Kudos: 8





	Something Echoed

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: laughter

You learn to carry the grief, the same as a blade or a bow.It is a weight on your back but a companionable one; its persistence has comfort, is familiar.You know it as well as the turning of days, the cold harm of a sword’s edge, the voice in your head that could be destiny or madness or both.You learn to rely on its resilience, the steadfastness it provides in the absence of exact memory.This world is full of ghosts and you are one of them.

This world is unfamiliar: something not new but rather strange, sinister, something shifted just outside its outline and context, like a shadow behind a portrait.Its designs are beyond you.Its ruins haunting.You are a ruin, maybe, you think sometimes.A monument to great failures unrecalled but with roots deep in the earth around you, something buried - a corpse ages to dust, with vines creeping through the hollow spaces in the bones.

You woke up aching and fearful, and not much has changed since then.Maybe you had known fear before, but not like this; sometimes you feel as brittle as the old and rusted swords you scavenge from the bones of this world, waiting to break when pressure hits a fracture point just so.

This is your world.

This is not your world.

This is a world waiting to be born.

This is a world that could die.

Over time, you take to talking to her in late hours, even when her voice is silent and does not answer or when she is silent because she has no answer.There are so many questions without resolution, impressions of the past with no shape memorial.Who was I? he wonders, And what of you?

What will we be if I succeed?

What will be if I fail again?

You never rest easy now, knowing that she is out there, that you have rested long enough while the world has paid the price.Whenever the night lulls you to the possibility of sleep gentle, the memory of a forest and a sword that will not forgive you keeps you alert and sharp, ever vigilant.

One night, you wake with the faint outlines of a memory, nothing concrete but something, vague and smudged at the edges.In it, you recall nothing of yourself, but she is there, and she is laughing.About what, you do not know, with whom you ache to know.The sound is like an echo of bells, beautiful and distant.It carries loud and strong from the past, with a weight lighter than grief but a persistence comparable.The night finds you weeping, though as always there are never the words to say why.

But in the morning, you choose to carry this, too, hoping to hear it again.


End file.
